Hands-on time spent with the upcoming 3DS title Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of …

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Waiting until after E3 for Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D is going to feel like ages, isn’t it?

On Tuesday, I met with Nintendo representatives in San Francisco to get an extended hands-on with the Nintendo 3DS remake of the classic Nintendo 64 Zelda game. I haven’t played Ocarina much since its original release in 1998, so it was helpful that Nintendo had a copy of the original game on hand during our meeting. It really drove the point home that this version of the game has had a top-to-bottom upgrade.

Nintendo started me just before the game’s first boss creature Gohma. After plinking him in the eyeball with my slingshot and taking him down, they had me run across Hyrule Field to the castle town. Before, the town was largely composed of low-resolution bitmaps; on 3DS everything is built out of polygons, although the original camera angles have been preserved to make it feel like the original.

After beating Gohma, we see one of the game’s well-known story sequences. There’s one point fans will really geek out over: we see the Zelda series' magical macguffin, the Triforce, except this time it’s spinning and rotating in 3-D, poking out towards you. This should be as impressive as that moment when we first saw that translucent, polygonal Triforce on the Super Nintendo back in 1991.

Nintendo

Then they jumped me into a later dungeon, the stomach and other internal organs of the great sea creature Jabu-Jabu. On the Nintendo 64, this was made of big blobs of red; on 3DS it has more I don’t know, connective tissue and stringy bits and such. And it was somewhere in that great fish’s guts that I realized I was going to play through Ocarina of Time again for the first time in 12 years; I’ve practically forgotten everything that happens, and the graphical upgrade alone is plenty enough to convince me to give it another shot.

This is not to mention the improved control scheme. Using the buttons on the touchpad to quickly swap Link’s weapons in and out makes Ocarina feel more like a modern game. The original game is of great historical importance; it is Nintendo working out the kinks and laying down the guidelines for how to make a 3D third-person action-adventure game, good examples of which were thin on the ground in 1998. But nowadays excellent ones are everywhere, and I have a hard time imagining myself going back to play the N64 game on Virtual Console.

But this? I’ll play this. Not least because the 3DS library is so filled with short experiences right now that a deep adventure of this sort is just what early adopters are dying for.